Living Green Barrie hopes local homeowners will be willing to share the fruits of their backyard labours to help their neighbours.
A recent online plea from the local not-for-profit corporation — which aims to increase public awareness of environmental issues, as well as educate and inform people about environmentally wise lifestyle and consumer choices — for homeowners that would be willing to donate the spoils of unused was answered in force, says Andee Pelan, the group's executive director.
“We had a crazy amount of people respond to this, so I am thinking it must be a bit of a bumper year for fruit, or a bumper year of people just wanting to get involved. Either way, the people who have the trees has definitely outstripped our scant resources to get the fruit picked,” she told BarrieToday. “We are going to be doing a pared down version of an apple and pear pick next week with whatever we can do.”
Pelan says the goal is to attempt to get out to as many people as possible next week to pick the unused fruit. However, if that’s not possible due to limited resources, they hope residents would consider picking the fruit themselves.
“We can pick it up from them or they can bring it to us and we will make sure it gets into the hands of the people that need it," she said.
Another option, Pelan added, is bringing their home-grown produce to Living Green’s Harvest Share event, scheduled for Tuesday, Sept. 24 at Lampman Lane Community Centre.
“With that event, we will be bringing the fruits of our labour — as in the fruit we collected that others have donated. People who put in COVID gardens can bring in all that extra zucchini that their neighbours don’t want to take anymore down to us,” she said, adding that all donated produce will be sorted by quality.
“What we’ve found in previous years with our fruit share is that a lot of fruit coming off backyard trees isn’t the same quality as what is expected at the grocery store. Even social service agencies won’t take a blemished apple because they know no one will take it. It’s just part of our expectations that an apple should look a certain way," Pelan added.
After being sorted, she said the table-ready produce will be delivered to the Barrie Native Friendship Centre for its Hunger For Hope program.
“There will also be a free Community Cares table so anybody can come and get some free, fresh, locally grown produce, Any fruit that is whole but blemished will be put into an antique cider press and turned into cider that da, and any fruit that is considered suspect will be given to a farm animal rescue, so there will be some happy pigs and goats at the end of it all,” she said. “The idea is there won’t be anything wasted.”
At the Harvest Share event later this month, she said representatives from the Barrie Public Library and the city’s parks and forestry departments will be on hand to offer some free programming, while volunteers with Urban Pantry will be offering cooking demonstrations of fried green tomatoes.
Living Green also hopes to offer information sessions on canning, dehydrating, storing fruit and vegetables and preserving — anything to do with how to ensure less waste.
“That’s really the crux of this program… making sure that we are harvesting and using our local bounty and that we don’t have waste," Pelan said.
From Living Green’s perspective, she said it’s about focusing on simple climate-change actions that individuals can accomplish.
“One of the big climate-change actions people are less aware of is that food waste is a huge climate change problem, especially any organic matter that ends up in the landfill. It’s very problematic because it breaks down as methane instead of being composted… and it’s 70 times more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide," Pelan said.
This initiative is similar to the Fruit Share program the organization ran for several years in Barrie, she added. However a lack of funding forced them to look at alternate ways to achieve a similar result.
“We didn’t want to abandon it, so this is our attempt at doing something simpler, but we’ve obviously not made it simpler.”
